LETTER: ’Campaigners’ ignoring science of B.C.’s forests, foresters

Terrence Coste is a Vancouver Island campaigner for the Wilderness Committee and Mark Worthing is a conservation and climate campaigner for the Sierra Club. Both work actively for US-based environmental groups with an agenda to stop extraction of natural resources in the hinterland of BC.

Both submitted guest articles to Victoria media noting they would be visiting BC communities speaking to people about the unsustainable forest practices, loss of old growth forests and decline of communities. Additionally, they write about erratic governance of forests, and continue to elevate concern about carbon pollution/climate change. The claim that everyone agrees with them is a “tactic” of exhorting public opinion to justify a political will, but without confirming real justifications.

These issues were raised to public opinion during the Clayoquot Sound logging protest of three decades ago. At that time, jobs were lost despite the promises and rhetoric of politicians and campaigners. The new forest plantations are flourishing with young trees sequestering carbon. Loggers assured environmentalists that the forests would renew. The old growth was doing nothing for carbon capture and therefore needed to be harvested and replanted. This is forest worker sense and experience.

B. Horestji of Penticton is a wildlife PHD scientist who promotes saving the forest for wildlife use. He too rewashes the 1990s anti-harvesting rhetoric. BC rural citizens need greater say in the science of social and economic reality and understanding of the hinterland, which differs from urbanites.

Speak against those environmental groups who seek to crush the BC people with their concept of alternative truth.